Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to the computer field, and more specifically, to methods and apparatuses for developing, testing, and deploying applications.
With rapid population and application of computer technologies in various fields, more and more businesses rely on a computer program or application. In a traditional application development mode, a developer would compile a business logic part of an application for example by an integrated development environment (IDE). In order to test an application under development, a tester needs to develop a corresponding test case, and establish and stet a corresponding test environment. Afterwards, in the deployment phase of an application, an operator must configure various parameters and information of a service dependent on a specific target environment.
However, with the development of a new-model computing technology such as cloud computing, the above traditional mode of application development and deployment is challenged. For example, in the above mode, a person in charge of developing, testing, and deployment must manually create a binding relationship between an application and a service required by the application, such that the application may access various resources provided by the service. Due to the increase of system complexity, such manual configuration seriously affects application development and deployment period and increases the costs. Additionally, an application needs to be migrated and configured between various different environments such as development, test, and deployment, and such migration may be completed by different teams. Repeatedly configuring an application by different persons for different various environments costs considerable human labor, materials, and time; and it lacks flexibility.
Specifically, a service associated with an application might have various parameters, for example, data source, host name, path, port number, and the like. During the development stage, since these parameters in a real running environment cannot be determined, a traditional practice is that a developer configures these parameters based on the local environment. During the subsequent testing and/or deployment stage, a corresponding person likewise needs to manually change the configuration of the service according to a different environment. The above process generally cannot be repeated and reproduced; besides, it is error-prone and inefficient. Besides, since a development team and an operating team belong to different departments, information inconsistency exists between them. Such inconsistency causes a relatively high operating risk for the system services, which may even cause a greater service loss. In some existing solutions, service configuration is solidified into a hard-coded or pre-compiled configuration file. However, such an approach lacks flexibility, which cause inconvenience to subsequent actions such as application maintenance, migration, and upgrade.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need in the art for a more efficient technical solution of developing and deploying an application.